FRANKFURT, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank is making publicly available elements of its electronic trading platform, enabling software firms to write new applications based on it or to suggest improvements.

“Autobahn” will be integrated into the “Symphony” financial industry messaging platform, which is backed by a consortium of major banks led by Goldman Sachs to share data and news.

Deutsche Bank said in a statement on Wednesday that putting Autobahn’s 150,000 lines of code into the public domain is designed to encourage the development of a standard trading platform that is not owned by one bank.

The code is designed to connect thousands of different applications from across the financial services industry, enabling banks and clients’ systems to talk to each other.

The German bank said the project is part of a strategy to modernise, simplify and standardise its technology. (Reporting by Arno Schuetze; editing by Eric Auchard and Alexander Smith)